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By Root 99 0

politesse, but perhaps history has made Czechs cautious. Perhaps in a country where disobedience has so often been met with brutality, the stakes must be high to inspire anything but careful dissent. As the crowd proceeds down the length of Wenceslas Square curious tourists, shopkeepers, and club touts briefly stop what they are doing to watch; for a moment the orderly procession of sign-toting protesters is the best thing going amid the movie theaters and hotels, oversized billboards and garish signs advertising fast food and discos. Midway down the boulevard stands a young woman clad in a bright yellow jacket that reads: EROTIC THEATRO 44 NUDE. She has abandoned her post to watch the action, her handful of flyers momentarily forgotten. Then she too grows bored of the parade.

Ped Trap

MALÁ STRANA IS A GORGEOUS PRESERVE OF Baroque architecture ideally suited for aimless, daydreamy excursions down its narrow, winding streets. If one isn’t paying close attention while ambling along a certain scenic avenue, it is entirely possible to end up following a narrow strip of sidewalk into a particular covered passageway just wide enough to accumulate trams. Once inside this passage the sidewalk disappears and is replaced by a small niche into which one must shrink to allow a streetcar to pass. On a sunny afternoon while rambling through Malá Strana, I emerged from this passage to find two policemen facing me as though we’d planned to meet. I smiled and continued to walk but they gestured for me to stop, pointing to a sign depicting a pedestrian diagonally bisected by a thick black line. I smiled and in my broken Czech thanked them for pointing out the sign and assured them that in the future I would be more careful. Until that point it was an interchange that could have happened in any number of American or Western European cities, the sort of benevolent policeman scenario found in stories written for children. Such stories are not written in Prague.

A first-time visitor to Prague might be led to assume the city possesses, along with its capitalist shopping and dining options, a Western European police force, but the Westernization of Prague’s commercial sector does not extend to its cops. Prague’s policemen are poorly paid and poorly trained and the majority are interested in using their position in whatever way they can for personal or material gain. Among Czechs, the police have a reputation for corruption, racism, and incompetence. Uniforms and guns earn compliance, but not trust. A policeman’s actions are arbitrary and can shift according to any number of variables including but not limited to his mood at the time; the gender, general attractiveness, and nationality of his offender; and the weather. Most Americans, of course, have little reason to suppose the words and deeds of a uniformed police officer might not be based on a solid legal foundation. Coming from a country where corrupt cops are the stuff of national scandal, Americans are a largely trusting and compliant bunch, secure in their belief that police are, in aggregate, interested in protecting the citizenry from bad guys and maintaining order. In Prague, one comes to realize that certain basic American premises like accountability are, in fact, luxuries. Prague’s police force finds this misapprehension extremely profitable.

The two policemen I encountered in Malá Strana that day were young, thickset men resembling soccer hooligans who had somehow scored mstská policie uniforms. In Prague, the mstská policie serve as the city’s traffic cops, an echelon below the obecni policie who stand around looking bored at the periphery of political demonstrations. In place of the obecni policie’s more martial hats and coats, the traffic cops wear baseball caps and black canvas jackets stamped with the words MTSKÁ POLICIE. It was a warm day and the younger of the two mstskás had unzipped his coat to reveal a black knit MTSKÁ POLICIE sweatshirt as well, the letters integrated into the weave of the fabric in the manner of an inexpensive sports team jersey, the kind given